Tag Archives: Kerouac

Here are some verses I wrote looking back on my time in San Francisco, when I was doing some poetry readings with Gerry Nicosia. It was an extraordinary experience, a blending of past and present, Old and New World, with poetry and poets flying between. As we walked through North Beach together we were increasingly conscious of the spiritual reverberations of the poetry we loved, the sense of hidden angels everywhere, of glory on the margins, and starlight glimpsed from the gutter. I felt myself suspended between a communion of the saints and a kind of communion of the poets, especially when we went to St. Peter and St. Paul’s where Kerouac and Cassady once prayed together in a moment of grace against the odds.

'where Jack and Neal once prayed'

That Church has a wonderful inscription from Dante’s Paradiso, written right above its entrance, a line in which Dante Praises the light that shines throughout the Universe. Of course Dante knew that light was Christ, as did Gerry and I. But maybe the true source and name of the light remained hidden at the time from Jack and Neal, though they kneeled on this spot to pray. I prayed that they might find or be found by that light, ‘let light perpetual shine upon them’. And I pondered again my own vocation as poet and priest, a vocation to respond to the smallest glimmer of the Christ light in myself and in others wherever and whenever I see it and to try and help all people, including myself, to recognise and turn to it. The whisps of fog that blew in and out of the city seemed to me an apt emblem for that partial light in which we see all things until we know fully even as we have been fully known. The ‘magic bus’ that Neal drove for the Grateful Dead just carried the word “Further” as the tag for its destination. but maybe it didnt go far enough, maybe if some of those wild explorers could have gone a little further upstream, along the line of such lights as they were given, they would have come to the Source Himself. But maybe in the end they did, I hope and pray so. I also hope this poem gets a little of the flavour of my experience and thoughts in that magical city. You might like to know that Van Morrison’s song Foggy Mountain Top has always been a favourite with my band Mystery Train, After years of singing it I finally came to San Francisco and found out what it is about. “Cloud-Hidden, whereabouts unknown” is a phrase from a chinese poet, the title of a book by Allan Watts, a former Anglican Priest who lived in San Francisco, and also the repeated chorus line in Van Morrison’s song Alan Watts Blues.